The Literary Battle for Nat Turner’s Legacy

In his 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron, a white southerner, told the story of America’s bloodiest slave revolt—in the voice of its African-American leader. Half a century later, Turner is the subject of Nate Parker’s new film, The Birth of a Nation, and the literary battle Styron ignited is still raging.

In 1967, when William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner was
published, it briefly looked as if a white southern liberal might have
found an ideal story to tell a country torn by racial strife. Styron’s
subject was a little-known historical event: America’s bloodiest slave
revolt. He recounted it in the imagined voice of the Virginia slave
turned preacher who had led the rebellion. And the novel’s first
readers, who included some of the most discriminating literary minds of
the time, were overwhelmed. “I was stunned by page ten,” John Cheever
wrote Styron after reading an advance copy, “and this situation mounted
until the end. I kept shouting . . . ‘He can’t keep this up, he
can’t, he can’t,’ but up and up it went. It is what literature should be
and is so seldom that I was incredulous. I think it is a work of
genius.”

There are dozens more letters like this in the papers that Styron left
to his alma mater, Duke University, before his death in 2006—mash
notes from the likes of Carlos Fuentes, Willie Morris, Richard Yates,
Wallace Stegner, and Louis Auchincloss. To read them is to enter a kind
of literary rapture. The Confessions of Nat Turner wasn’t just a good
novel but a great one—the best since Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
(wrote Yale scholar R. W. B. Lewis), since Saul Bellow’s Herzog “and
quite likely better” (declared Robert Lowell), and seemed “an American
classic written by a contemporary of Hawthorne and Melville.”

Styron, according to his mentor Robert Penn Warren, had created the
template for “a new kind of novel.” To Francine du Plessix Gray it was
a spiritual landmark; in a handwritten note she told Styron, “I can
only compare it to reading the Bible.” And the African-American author
and journalist Alex Haley, excited by reading a newspaper interview with
Styron, sent along these words of fellowship and gratitude: “I don’t
know if I’ve ever seen captured so succinctly what I, too, feel are the
essences of our ethnic condition, and the true motivations of the social
tragedies recently.”

View more

The Confessions of Nat Turner dropped off syllabuses long ago, replaced
by such other tours de force as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Edward P.
Jones’s The Known World. Yet Styron’s subject is fresher than ever.
Antebellum slavery is on many minds—its sins and crimes, its
irreducible impact, its consequences that divide us to this day, evident
in the recent bloodshed in Ferguson and Baltimore, Dallas and Baton
Rouge, and in the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

From Peter Harrington Books.

Every week, it seems, another headline screams at us: the Confederate
flags at last removed from southern statehouses after the mass murder of
African-American churchgoers in Charleston; the Jesuit founders of
Georgetown University who paid off their debts by sending slaves,
including infants, to hellish plantations in the Deep South; the battles
over John C. Calhoun at Yale and dormitory “house masters” at Harvard.
The legacy of slavery informs recent novels (Homegoing; Grace) and
movies (The Free State of Jones; Ava DuVernay’s documentary The 13th) as
well as the new National Museum of African American History & Culture,
which opens in Washington in September.

Meanwhile, Styron’s protagonist, Nat Turner, has been revived—in The
Birth of a Nation, a feature, set to premiere in October, that is
already being discussed as a serious contender for next year’s Oscar.
Its star, director, and screenwriter, Nate Parker, is an
African-American who grew up in Virginia, as did Turner and Styron. (At
36, Parker is one year older than Styron was when he began work on his
novel in 1960.) And in some respects the movie fulfills Styron’s
original ambitions. Parker, who spent years researching Turner’s life
and times, is dismissive of Styron’s effort, echoing many back in the
60s. “Styron’s novel ignited a much-deserved criticism as he
annihilated Turner’s character. . . ,” says Parker. “[His]
reimagining [of Turner] played directly into white America’s fear
and anxieties surrounding the intention and potential of the
contemporary Black male.”

But this harsh judgment rests on an ineradicable truth. It was William
Styron—the product of what he wryly termed an “absolutely impeccable
WASP background”—who dug up the buried nugget of Nat Turner’s
rebellion and polished it into a modern parable. This was the reason for
its initial praise—from black readers as well as white. But it also
became the reason for the startling reversal of fortune that followed.
The Confessions of Nat Turner remains the most vivid case of a literary
work that arrived in glory—critical praise; a Pulitzer Prize; the top
slot on the New York Times best-seller list—only to be consumed by
larger forces that its creator, for all his imaginative powers, didn’t
see coming. In August 1967, the Times would describe Styron, without
irony, as an “expert in the Negro condition.” Six months later many
were regarding him as a frothing racist, accused—as Styron bitterly
recalled—of having written “a malicious work, deliberately falsifying
history.” He had, as he later put it, “unwittingly created one of the
first politically incorrect texts of our time.”

Today the furor over The Confessions of Nat Turner is more relevant than
ever. The questions Styron struggled with continue to provoke us. Who
“owns” American history? Who gets to tell which stories—and why? Is
artistic license a hallowed precept or a stale presumption? Bill Styron
learned the answers in the most direct and painful way.

Retaliatory Carnage

The idea had haunted Styron since he was a teenager and saw a sign on
Route 58 in Virginia. It tersely commemorated an all-but-forgotten
episode—the failed insurrection, in 1831, organized by “Nat Turner, a
Negro,” who had led a small brigade of slaves and freemen on a rampage
through 20 miles of Southampton County. Wielding axes and swords, farm
tools and muskets, Turner and his followers butchered the residents of
20 households across the choked wetlands, leaving 57 corpses, many the
remains of women and children, some slaughtered in their beds. After two
days, as the insurgents closed in on the county seat, Jerusalem (later
renamed Courtland), they were met by a waiting and well-armed militia.

It was the nightmare that had long vexed the South: field hands suddenly
grabbing their implements and turning on their masters. And when that
fear became fact, it unleashed an orgy of retaliatory carnage.
Vigilantes killed as many as 200 black men and women, some tortured,
mutilated, decapitated. At least one head was mounted on a stake as a
gruesome totem—and warning. (A local road still retains the
ignominious name: Blackheads Signpost.)

Nat Turner was “ONE OF THE FIRST POLITICALLY INCORRECT TEXTS.”

Turner himself, captured after a two-month search, might have been
erased from history. But Thomas Gray, a mysterious Baltimore lawyer, had
visited him in his prison cell and made a record of their exchanges. He
encountered a man he described as a literate “slave preacher” who
“certainly never had the advantages of education, but he can read and
write, (it was taught him by his parents,) and for natural intelligence
and quickness of apprehension, is surpassed by few men I have ever
seen.” At one point Gray asked him if he’d erred in his revolt, given
the result. “Was not Christ crucified?,” Turner replied. He had
mastered the Bible and sounded himself like an Old Testament prophet.
“While laboring in the field, I discovered drops of blood on the corn
as though it were dew from heaven—and I communicated it to many, both
white and black, in the neighborhood,” he told Gray—or so Gray
recorded him “fully and voluntarily,” as he put it in The Confessions
of Nat Turner, a pamphlet published at the time.

Within days, Turner was hanged and dismembered. But he had challenged
slavery in a way that foretold its doom. After the revolt, the Virginia
legislature seriously debated abolishing slavery. The measure was
defeated and, instead, slave states tightened their regimes, which only
fed the growing protests of those convinced that slavery was a moral
stain on the Republic. It is not an exaggeration to say that Turner’s
rebellion, in harshening public sentiment about slavery, helped advance
the nation toward Civil War.

An Auspicious Houseguest

In 1960, when William Styron began working on his novel, the country was
in the throes of the civil-rights movement, or, as many called it, the
“revolution.” Its leader, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.,
radiated a “quality of conciliation,” as Styron would later recall,
“a spirit of amity, concord, and the hope of a mutual understanding.”

It was in a similar spirit that Styron, active in liberal causes and
Democratic politics throughout the 1960s, supposed he might reconstitute
the mind-set of a black man from the 1830s. And in the summer of 1960,
back from a trip to Paris and Rome—and coming off the disappointment
of an ambitious but poorly received book about expatriate life, Set This
House on Fire—he began gathering material on “wild Nat Turner, that
fanatical black demon whose ghost had seared my imagination throughout
my boyhood and youth,” as he would have his narrator, Stingo, recall in
the 1979 novel Sophie’s Choice.

Parker, as preacher Nat Turner, center, with Armie Hammer and Jayson Warner Smith in The Birth of a Nation.

From Fox Searchlight Pictures/Everett Collection.

Styron, that September, had just begun to immerse himself in his
background reading when his wife, Rose, picked up the phone. It was
Robert Silvers, a 30-year-old magazine editor and part of the Paris
Review crowd, along with George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, and Styron
himself. Today, Silvers is best known as the editor of The New York
Review of Books, which he helped found in 1963. But in 1960 he was at
Harper’s and was editing James Baldwin, who was trying to finish an
essay on Dr. King. “I worked with him closely on it at a flat he then
had in the West Village,” Silvers remembers. “He told me that he’d
become exhausted and tired of New York and wanted to get away, and it
occurred to me that Bill, with whom I’d talked about Jimmy’s work, might
want to have him stay [at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut].”

Styron offered Baldwin his guesthouse, a small barn, which was near the
main house with an arbor in between. It was normally Styron’s workspace,
but he shifted to a spare upstairs bedroom in the roomy farmhouse. For
the next eight months, off and on, Baldwin stayed with the Styrons and
their three small children, working on his novel Another Country. The
two writers kept separate schedules and got together at dinner with Rose
around nine o’clock, the start of a long evening in the peaceful rural
night—amid six acres of gently rolling farmland.

The three would retreat to the living room in the back of the house,
with its high ceiling, stucco walls, and glass doors. Styron poured Jack
Daniel’s at the pine bar, and on frigid winter nights a fire roared in
the large hearth as the two men chain-smoked and conversed late into the
evening. Both were talkers, though of different sorts: Styron was a
raconteur, deliberate, measured, almost diffident, as he carefully
shaped his phrases, pausing between thoughts; Baldwin, bristling with
nervous energy, had blazing dark eyes and a silken voice roughened by
the booze and the Marlboros. “I think that Jimmy broke down the last
shred,” Styron was to say, “of whatever final hangup of Southern
prejudice I might have had . . . .”

It was more friendship than literary partnership. “We never spoke about
our work, or very rarely,” Baldwin later told The Paris Review. “It
was a wonderful time in my life, but not at all literary. We sang songs,
drank a little too much, and on occasion chatted with the people who
were dropping in to see us.” It was a curious pairing, Harlem and
Tidewater. Baldwin’s grandparents had been slaves; Styron’s grandmother
had owned slaves. This history brought them closer together by the
calculus of high liberal optimism in the early 60s when civil rights had
become not just an issue or a cause but a call to ennoblement. “They
talked about their black and white southern history,” Rose Styron, 88,
now recalls, “and how similar and different they were, but also how
they understood the same culture.” The story of Nat Turner was about
slavery and race, but just as profoundly about the South.

Baldwin was months away from going to Chicago for a rare interview with
Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, and then writing
about it in his great book of essays The Fire Next Time, with its
warning that white America had much to answer for. Before leaving
Roxbury, however, Baldwin insisted, in fact dared, Styron to write Nat
Turner’s story from inside the character’s own head. It was a prodigious
leap. But it was a purely aesthetic one, not fraught with the charges of
“cultural appropriation” that so often weigh on writers today.
Midcentury artists were intellectual free agents, who could steal
whatever they found. Examples were rife and extreme. The hothouse flower
Tennessee Williams had created the feral, brutish Stanley Kowalski.
Norman Mailer, the Brooklyn Jew from Harvard, filled his novels with
Texas rednecks and Boston Irishmen. Baldwin himself peopled his books
with narrators who crossed racial and sexual boundaries. And yet for
Styron the risks were higher. The long history of whites “playing”
blacks was tainted with minstrelsy. Great writers like Melville and
Faulkner had tried, but from a distance. To invent Turner’s “voice”
would be a brazen act with little precedent. With Baldwin’s
encouragement, or blessing, Styron began his impersonation of Nat
Turner.

In the Kennedys’ Court

In April 1962, the Kennedys invited Nobel laureates and other V.I.P.’s
to the White House for one of the first of the great Camelot galas.
Baldwin and Styron, two promising writers in their mid-30s, were in
attendance. “Huck and Jim,” Styron said at the time, comparing the two
of them to their dignified elders. “Jack and Jackie actually
shimmered,” Styron would later write in Vanity Fair. “They were truly
the golden couple,” their glamour palpable to some of the guests, who
seemed lost in “a goofy, catatonic glaze.”

Afterward, a White House aide led the Styrons to the Kennedys’ small
after-party, joining the First Couple; the critics Lionel and Diana
Trilling; the poet Robert Frost; the actor Fredric March; the Kennedy
adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr.; and Attorney General Robert Kennedy and
his wife, Ethel. As the night progressed, the Styrons and Kennedys
discussed their many friends in common—in Manhattan and Connecticut,
and out on Martha’s Vineyard. Jackie leaned over and told Rose to expect
a visit on the Vineyard that summer.

Three months later, she made good on her promise, and a Marine launch
picked up the Styrons at the Edgartown Yacht Club—“a gray choppy day,
but rainless though a little cool,” Styron reported in a letter to his
father—and ferried them to the Kennedys’ cabin cruiser, Patrick J.
Life jackets, Bloody Marys, “eggs in aspic and a tasteless salad of
some kind,” Cuban cigars in silver tubes. Jackie’s “shapely but rather
large bare feet” rested in Kennedy’s lap. The talk turned to politics.
“The issue of race was plainly beginning to bedevil Kennedy,” Styron
recalled in the V.F. article. He told the president about Nat Turner.
Kennedy’s “mind is wide-ranging and fantastically filled with facts,”
Styron wrote, and yet, “I told Kennedy things about slavery he had
obviously never known before.”

The following year, 1963, civil-rights marches spread throughout the
South. There were tense showdowns in Birmingham, the authorities turning
fire hoses on protesters and children while the TV cameras rolled. Over
a 10-week period there were demonstrations in 186 cities, capped by the
March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream”
speech. Styron, attuned to what he called every African-American’s
“desire to break through and assert himself,” felt his novel evolve
into an allegory of black protest.

The dinner parties WERE LEGEND: MAILER, NICHOLS, ROTH, SINATRA.

One night the Styrons, Jack, and Jackie found themselves at a party at
J.F.K.’s sister Jean and her husband Stephen Smith’s Fifth Avenue
duplex. Many of the guests were theater people. The president and the
Styrons made eye contact. “He bore down upon us like long lost
friends,” Styron would write in a letter to one of his Duke professors.
Kennedy flattered the couple with teasing blarney. “How did they get
you here?” the president asked. “They had a hard enough time getting
me here!” But Kennedy had serious literary interests. He’d wanted to be
a writer himself when he was young, had won a Pulitzer for Profiles in
Courage, and enjoyed the company of learned men. He abruptly said to
Styron, “How is that book of yours coming along?”

“And so we talked about it,” Styron recounted. “He asked me something
about historical sources, and what research I had used, and what
approach I was going to use to tell the story, and of course that
started me off, the flood-gates were opened.” They discussed “slavery
for a full ten minutes, the conversation finally getting around to the
present revolt, just the three of us standing there amid a swirling mass
of showgirls.”

Before they parted, Kennedy asked if Styron knew any African-American
writers he might invite to the White House. That was Friday, November 8.
Two weeks later, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

“My Tortoise-like ‘Art’ ”

The previous summer, Styron had begun. He nudged a No. 2 pencil across
sheets of yellow legal paper, each sentence polished before he moved on
to the next. The most methodical of novelists, he demanded utter
silence, even with small children in the house. He had a stone wall
built in front to try to muffle the noise of passing vehicles, according
to his daughter Alexandra in her 2011 memoir, Reading My Father. His
pattern was all but inviolate. Up at noon, leisurely lunch or brunch
with Rose. Push away from the table at two o’clock for a long walk with
his dogs, while he organized his thoughts for the afternoon siege. Then,
into the barn until he emerged at 7:30 with “my painful 600 words,”
which he refined some more over a drink at the bar and then gave to Rose
for typing, about two and a half pages in all. Once he was done he
tinkered very little. “This guy does not revise heavily and start all
over again,” says his longtime editor, Robert Loomis, aged 89. “Bill’s
first draft was essentially his final draft.”

Word of Bill Styron’s new book was getting around. Roxbury was becoming
a hub for artists and writers. Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe had been
the Styrons’ first neighbors. “I saw her often, up in a field, with her
little black dress and a triangular cotton scarf over her head and tied
under her chin, looking absolutely beautiful,” Rose recalls. The
Styrons’ dinner parties were legend: Leonard Bernstein, Norman Mailer,
Mike Nichols, Philip Roth, Frank Sinatra.

On occasion, Styron, an animated reader, pulled out pages of Nat Turner,
and Loomis, having driven up from 11th Street, in the Village, heard
much of the novel in progress. Gay Talese listened to bits of it, too.
The Styrons, at the time, were borrowing an apartment in Talese’s
brownstone on the East Side, hoping to rent it someday. “At night
sometimes he’d come down and read four or five pages,” Talese
remembers. “I didn’t even know who Nat Turner was. I’d never heard of
him.”

Interest was radiating outward. Styron had seized the great subject of
the moment: protests turning violent and moving out of the South and
into the North. The nation felt under siege and adrift, recovering from
J.F.K.’s murder and preoccupied with “the crisis” of the city and Cold
War tensions. Out of these conflicts, however, sprang progress and hope.
In the summer of 1964, for example, Styron would find himself huddling
with his next-door neighbor on the Vineyard, Richard Goodwin, Lyndon
Johnson’s speechwriter. L.B.J. had accomplished the unthinkable: ramming
a major civil-rights bill through Congress, a promise made after
Kennedy’s death. The president was now ready to sign it and needed
remarks for the ceremony. To help draft the speech, Goodwin enlisted
Styron, trusting his sensitivity toward racial issues and his feel for
the elevating phrase. (Styron’s words “unending search for justice”
made it into the speech, and a clipping of *The New York Times’*s
coverage, with L.B.J.’s scrawled “with warm regards” in the margin, is
still framed in Rose Styron’s house.)

The following January, the Styrons were invited to Washington for
Johnson’s inauguration. (No shimmering Jack and Jackie this time, only
“drunk Texans in big hats.”) While Styron was getting dressed in the
White House, his publisher, Bennett Cerf, called breathlessly to say the
mass market publisher New American Library had offered $100,000 for the
book—even though the novel was less than a third finished. (Subsidiary
deals were already being made that would eventually bring him a million
dollars.) But Styron didn’t rush. “My tortoise-like ‘art,’ ” as he
called it, had to proceed at its deliberate pace. Once he reached the
climactic scenes of violence, however, the pages came quickly. By
January 1967, Styron’s fictional account of the first great
African-American uprising was completed. It had taken four and a half
years, during which nonviolent protests had given way to blood in the
streets.

“A New Kind of Novel”

The Confessions of Nat Turner—Styron lifted Thomas Gray’s title—is
not really a historical novel. For Styron, as for many southern writers,
the form connoted dumbed-down costume drama—camellias and crinoline,
the cloying scent of Gone with the Wind. In an author’s note, he settled
on the loftier “meditation on history.” Styron’s Nat is himself
preoccupied with history. Alone in his prison cell, trussed up in
chains, stomach grumbling, execution near, he imagines the old
plantation life as a white owner might, and in stately 19th-century
rhythms: “The great mill wheel, its last revolution accomplished, lay
idle on its oaken shaft bedecked with dry mattings of greenish pond weed
and grass,” Turner recalls. Remembered sounds drift back musically:
“the chink-chinking of hoes in the distant cornfields, sheep bleating
on the lawn and a Negro’s sudden rich laughter.” Reading this, a reader
forgets the narrator is a slave. And then, gradually, he sees that this
is Styron’s point. Nat Turner is not a lesser being, diminished by
captivity, but someone observant and sensitive, a fellow mortal. Thus
the reader shares his shock when Turner, as a young boy, first hears
himself appraised as chattel: “Nigger, Negro, darky, yes—but I had
never heard myself called a Slave before. . . . I felt awkward and
naked, stripped down to bare black flesh, and a wicked chill like cold
water filled the hollow of my gut as the thought crashed in upon me:
Yes, I am a slave.”

Author James Baldwin lived at William Styron’s house in 1962 as Styron began writing The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Like its form-bending contemporaries In Cold Blood (Truman Capote’s
“nonfiction novel”) and The Armies of the Night (Norman Mailer’s
“history as a novel, the novel as history”), The Confessions of Nat
Turner arose out of an idea, vanished long ago, that the best writers
could explain America to itself—and gain the attention of the mighty
while they did it. “[Styron] has begun the common history—ours,”
Baldwin said—that is, the shared history of slavery and the damage it
inflicted on a single, fractured nation. The praise still adorns
paperback editions of the book.

That was the spirit in which Styron had begun writing in 1962. But did
it still apply in 1967? Galleys were mailed to reviewers in May and
June, just before the “Long Hot Summer,” a sequence of racial
disturbances, 159 street clashes and riots in all, from Atlanta to
Buffalo, with conflagrations in Detroit and Newark. In a cover story for
Newsweek, Raymond Sokolov began by noting parallels between the violent
vision of Styron’s Nat Turner (he’d exhorted his followers, “I made it
plain murder was an essential act for their own freedom”) and the
rhetoric of militant separatists like Stokely Carmichael (“black
power”) and H. Rap Brown (“burn, baby, burn”). Styron vehemently
disagreed, saying, “You can see Nat Turner as an archetypal American
tragic hero, but this doesn’t make Rap Brown an archetypal hero.”

It was the book of the moment. Life and Harper’s had a bidding war over
excerpts. Hollywood came calling, attracted by Styron’s imagery, the
propulsive narrative, and the antebellum atmospherics (even if many
whites were depicted as “brandy-fragrant sun-scorched snaggle-mouthed
anus-scratching farmers”). The writer and director Garson Kanin, a
friend of Styron’s, was already visualizing it, though he professed, “I
would not dare to be the one to attempt it, I so fear bruising it in
some small way.” The producer David Wolper, who 10 years later would
co-produce the mini-series Roots, was mad for the project and purchased
the rights for $600,000, a record amount at the time. He, in turn,
brought on Norman Jewison, who had directed In the Heat of the Night, a
film that had broken a long-standing taboo when its big-city black
detective, played by Sidney Poitier, struck a plantation owner in the
face while a stunned white sheriff, played by Rod Steiger, looked on.

The Counterattack

Meanwhile, the backlash had been building. Styron’s humanizing touches,
intended to make Turner a properly “complicated” hero in a serious
novel, included some that unsettled many readers. Styron has his
protagonist fall in love with the 18-year-old “belle of the county,”
Margaret Whitehead, who later becomes the one white victim he kills
himself. It’s a story of requited love, but it seemed to invite the
age-old hysteria about “race-mixing.”

Styron had miscalculated. His “common history” was narrower than he
knew. He’d had superb historical advisers such as C. Vann Woodward, the
great Yale historian of the South, and Robert Penn Warren, who had
recently published a powerful book, Who Speaks for the Negro?, based on
searching interviews with civil-rights leaders. But Styron had
overlooked another part of the story that was familiar in the
African-American world: Nat Turner’s standing as a mythic figure,
celebrated “in pageants during Negro History Week . . . a
magnificent forefather enshrined in the National Pantheon beside the
greatest heroes of the Republic,” as the renowned culture critic Albert
Murray pointed out in a review of the book in the left-leaning New
Leader. Styron plainly didn’t know the verses black children sang in
school:

Well you can be milk-white and just as rich as cream
And buy a solid gold carriage with a four-horse team
But you cain’t keep the world from movering round
Or stop old Nat Turner from gaining ground.

Murray was a gentleman critic of the old school. Others were less
polite. Styron came under attack at public panels and events. Dissenting
reviews and commentaries were collected in a book, William Styron’s Nat
Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. The contributors had tallied up the
many liberties he had taken. Nat Turner’s sermons rang false to scholars
who had studied church rhetoric from the era. The doubts and indecision
Styron imputes to Turner had no factual basis. And why would Turner lust
after a young white woman when there was evidence he was married? Styron
himself, despite the support he would receive from important writers and
academics, would later summarize the verdict against him. He’d written
“one long hysterical polemic from beginning to end: I’m a racist, a
distorter of history, a defamer of black people, a traducer of the
heroic image of ‘our’ Nat Turner.”

The reaction was fiercest in Hollywood, where the writer Louise
Meriwether formed the Black Anti-defamation Association (BADA), which
led a campaign to stop Wolper and Jewison from making a Turner movie.
Its spokesman was the actor Ossie Davis, who had been approached to play
the lead. (James Earl Jones would later accept the part.) Davis insisted
that the novel, with its depiction of a black man’s passion for a white
woman, was bad enough. But putting it on film would only feed the
fixations that had led to the lynching and castration of blacks
“because some ignorant white believed they were after their lily white
women.”

In a highly publicized debate in 1968—that doubled as a fund-raiser
for the presidential campaign of Eugene McCarthy, the liberal
Democrat—Davis and Styron each presented his case with painstaking
civility, alongside a moderator—James Baldwin, a friend of both men.
The audience consisted of film-industry types, including Joan Didion,
who would describe the event in her classic essay collection The White
Album. (The Beverly Hills scene, she wrote, “not unlike Senator
McCarthy’s campaign itself, had a certain déjà vu aspect to it, a glow
of 1952 humanism.”) Baldwin, measuring the tensions in the room,
carefully split the difference, saying that Styron was in the right,
“because no one can tell a writer what he can write,” but that Davis
was, too. “Bill’s novel is a private act, but what happens when it’s
onscreen and disseminated at this time in our history? There’s a
possibility that thousands of black people will die.” This was less
hyperbolic than it might sound. Martin Luther King Jr. had been
assassinated in April. A week after the debate, civil-rights champion
Robert F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Los Angeles.

Wolper and Jewison acceded to various demands made by Davis. The
N.A.A.C.P., Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and members of
the Black Panther Party also got involved. But Wolper pressed on. He
hired an accomplished African-American screenwriter, Louis Peterson. As
the script was being written, Sidney Lumet replaced Jewison, who had
moved on to direct Fiddler on the Roof. But by January 1970, Fox
announced it was suspending the film indefinitely because of rising
costs. It didn’t help that southern whites were also incensed—by
Styron’s picture of barbarous slave owners. (In the end the movie was
canceled. Almost 30 years later, Spike Lee would try to resurrect it, at
the urging of Henry Louis Gates Jr., a fan of the novel, who brought Lee
and Styron together. But the money never materialized.)

“There was no question that he was embittered,” Rose Styron now says
of her husband. Frightened too. Styron’s editor Bob Loomis remembers
getting a panicked call one night from the author, who had rushed into
Manhattan after Rose failed to return to Roxbury on schedule, fearing
his wife had been kidnapped. But it was deeper than mere paranoia. The
controversy surrounding the book, Rose now suspects, was an early flare
in her husband’s long battle with depression, a struggle that would even
drive him to consider suicide. “The first time I had seen him depressed
in the flesh was in the reaction to that book,” she says. “The low was
lower because the high was so high.”

While the civil-rights movement had gained momentum from its nonviolent protests, clashes were common by the time the book appeared, such as this confrontation, above, during the 1967 Newark riots.

By Neal Boenzi/The New York Times/Redux.

“A Tremendous Fight”

Today readers know Styron better from Sophie’s Choice and Darkness
Visible, his memoir about depression, which began as a 1989 Vanity Fair
story that was selected as the best magazine essay of the year. But The
Confessions of Nat Turner may be Styron’s most significant work, having
accomplished the rare feat of meeting a traumatic moment with a story
powerful enough to create a culture war. Indeed, it’s a literary battle
we’re still fighting. In the ensuing years, Bellow, Mailer, Harper Lee,
and others would come under attack for being politically tone-deaf. What
all of these writers shared was the belief that there really was, or
could be, a “common history,” equally true for all readers, who might
together form a single American audience. But this too had been an
illusion—or a sentimental aspiration. “He knew he was trespassing,”
Loomis says. “We didn’t know ahead of time how serious it would get.
Nobody knew.”

Well, someone did. “Bill’s going to catch it from black and white,”
James Baldwin asserted as the book came out. “Styron is probing
something very dangerous, deep and painful in the national psyche. I
hope it starts a tremendous fight, so that people will learn what they
really think about each other.”

No white writer of our age would take the risk William Styron did. We
all know better now. But in knowing more, we venture less. “It’s a book
I admire very much,” Baldwin later said. “He had to try to put himself
in the skin of Nat Turner. . . . It was a white Southern writer’s
attempt to deal with something that was tormenting him and frightening
him. I respect him very much for that.”

See John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie As You’ve Never Seen Them Before

Dizzy Gillespie takes a moment at the Monterey Jazz Festival on September 20, 1963.

In 1967, when William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner was
published, it briefly looked as if a white southern liberal might have
found an ideal story to tell a country torn by racial strife. Styron’s
subject was a little-known historical event: America’s bloodiest slave
revolt. He recounted it in the imagined voice of the Virginia slave
turned preacher who had led the rebellion. And the novel’s first
readers, who included some of the most discriminating literary minds of
the time, were overwhelmed. “I was stunned by page ten,” John Cheever
wrote Styron after reading an advance copy, “and this situation mounted
until the end. I kept shouting . . . ‘He can’t keep this up, he
can’t, he can’t,’ but up and up it went. It is what literature should be
and is so seldom that I was incredulous. I think it is a work of
genius.”